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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Who Was at War on September 11, 2012?

Former Secretary of State Clinton will testify today before a Congressional committee on the attack on our facilities at Benghazi on September 11, 2012 that left four Americans dead.

I remain concerned by the failure of our military to even try to send help that day. The secondary question is whether for political reasons the administration tried to dismiss the attack as a video-related protest gone awry to support the notion that our wars were responsibly ending.

Those questions are related to my suspicion that there was command influence from the White House that the war was over and that nobody should act like we are at war to undermine the campaign narrative.

The Department of Homeland Security is urging Americans to contemplate the supplies we'd need to cope with a zombie crisis:

Tongue firmly in cheek, the government urged citizens Thursday to prepare for a zombie apocalypse, part of a public health campaign to encourage better preparation for genuine disasters and emergencies. The theory: If you're prepared for a zombie attack, the same preparations will help during a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake or terrorist attack.

It's a shame we don't have a real world example of a threat.

Well, perhaps some man-caused disaster as a reason to prepare will come to mind in a couple days.

Under the circumstances, I'm deeply offended by the zombie preparation campaign.

Boy did we get a reminder in a couple days. We were (and remain) at war with murderous enemies who cared not one whit for the reelection theme that the wars were winding down.

Like I said, I want to know why our military in Europe didn't go to the sounds of the guns. That doesn't require "stand down" orders or secret arms cells in Benghazi or whatever else is out there as an accusation--and a distraction as far as I'm concerned.

In the weeks before September 11, 2012, al-Qaeda saber-rattled about a potential Tehran 1979–style attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo — perhaps they’d burn it to the ground, perhaps they’d take hostages to trade for American concessions like release of the Blind Sheikh (imprisoned for terrorism convictions in the U.S.).

Administration officials knew there would be trouble on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. They also knew that, if the trouble was perceived as the foreseeable fallout of their Islamist empowerment policy, it could mortally damage Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Clinton’s 2016 election ambitions.

My suspicion is that the administration was determined to pretend the war was over--fast receding, for sure--and that this command influence was felt in the chain of command that suppressed the normal instinct in the military to move to the sound of the guns.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!